November 18, 2019

To Student 1’s Family,

Hello, my name is Alison Jacobs. I am a student from the University of Mount Union. I
have been working this semester with your student on Tuesdays and Thursdays while part of the
RAC program. The RAC program was designed to give students extra help by working closely
with a student teacher from Mount Union. This semester I have been working with him to learn
more about his strengths and areas for improvement. I wanted to share with you this information
that I found.
As a result, of having many opportunities to work with student 1, I have learned about his
strengths. One of his strengths is using antonyms and synonyms to help him with the definition
of words. He also has a strength in knowing the story elements of a fictional story. He knows
what the story elements are and knows how to recall them from a given text after orally reading.
Student 1 also has strengths in his creative ideas when writing. He knows to think about what he
is going to write. He thinks about what ideas and details he will need to make his writing sound
better. He is a very hard worker and has a great attitude about school.
In addition to strengths, I also know that student 1 has some areas for improvements. One
skill that he could improve on would be knowing the difference between fiction and nonfiction
texts. He needs practice remembering that fiction is fantasy and nonfiction has real facts. He
could also improve on editing his writing. More specifically, double checking for capital letters,
punctuation, spelling, and writing complete sentences. When orally and silently reading student 1
could additionally improve on comparing and contrasting and drawing conclusion skills.
I’d like to share with you some activities that you can do at home that would help student
1 improve in school. The first activity I included are two worksheets that will help him with the
differences between fiction and nonfiction books. He will read the words in the box and decide if
that is something that is in a fiction book or a nonfiction book and will write that word on that
side of the Venn Diagram. The second activity for fiction vs nonfiction, he will find a book that
is fiction and a book that is nonfiction and give the titles of the book and a description of why it
is fiction or nonfiction. The next sheet deals with editing writing. I gave a potential writing
prompt that could be used along with a checklist of ways that we edit our writing. Mason can
write his answer to the prompt, then use his checklist to edit his writing. The last two sheets can
help him to answer questions after he is finished reading. One worksheet has questions that deal
with fiction and the other one has nonfiction questions. These questions can be asked after
student 1 is finished with reading. This will help him to look deeper into the texts to answer
critical thinking questions.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to work with student 1. He is a great student and I
had a great time working with him. If you have any questions please feel free to email me at
jacobsac2020@mountunion.edu I hope he had a good time working with me.

Sincerely,

Alison Jacobs
Activities:
Fiction vs nonfiction-
Editing writing-
After reading deeper thinking questions-